At 9pm on 11/11/04 you (Paul Sandoz) wrote:
MIME media type name: application
MIME subtype name: soap+fastinfoset
This is an incorrect generalization of the name 'soap+xml'. Names with + in them are (IIRC) currently reserved, except for the case of '+xml' to indicate an format which uses XML. The name should be 'soap-fastinfoset', or you should propose that the IETF extend the '+xml' syntax to other types (such as fastinfoset) and get an IANA registry set up for such types... personally, I think that would be a very good idea (I can think of at least two other uses for this convention: '+zip' for formats which are a zip file with a specific layout, such as JAR, Perl's PAR, mozilla.org's XPI and Quake's pk3; and '+gzip'/'+bzip2' to denote a gzip compressed version of a format), but it would need proper discussion and specification.
Magic number(s): A W3C SOAP message infoset serialized as a fast infoset document may begin with one of the following byte sequences:
- a byte sequence that corresponds to a UTF-8 encoded XML declaration of the string "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='finf'", the first five bytes of which are hexadecimal 3C 3F 78 6D 6C;
The first five bytes here are not the relevant ones; the important bytes are the 66 69 6e 66 at position 31; perhaps a sentence to the effect of 'fast infoset documents can be XML documents with an encoding of 'finf' specified in the XML declaration' with a reference to the XML registration for how to identify and parse an XML document. Also, this does not identify specifically a soap fast infoset entity, merely a generic fast infoset entity, so this whole section should probably just reference the next registration unless there is a way to reliably identify those fast infosets used in SOAP. I'm a little worried about 'bytes' as opposed to 'octets': what's the IETF position on this? 'octets' is definitely less ambiguous.
MIME media type name: application
MIME subtype name: fastinfoset
Is it worth registering two separate types, 'application/fastinfoset' and 'application/fastinfoset+xml' for fast infosets that are not and are encoded as XML documents, respectively? Ben -- Every twenty-four hours about 34k children die from the effects of poverty. Meanwhile, the latest estimate is that 2800 people died on 9/11, so it's like that image, that ghastly, grey-billowing, double-barrelled fall, repeated twelve times every day. Full of children. [Iain Banks] ben@morrow.me.uk